Foreign Perspectives

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One of the things that I’ve been looking at over the last couple of days is how I present the affiliate properties on the holiday listings sites and particularly on the new generation versions of them.

What I’d been doing was listing 5 properties from my own site along with 5 from theirs. That worked out fine in areas where the balance between my properties and theirs was more or less equal. So, for example, if I had three properties in an area and they’d 4 or 5 all the properties ended up on one page.

Where it didn’t work out so well was where they’d a lot more properties than I had. For instance, if I had five and they’d 500 then what happened was that one page was generated with my five plus five of theirs. Well, what I did a week ago was to increase the limit to 100 per page for them which created a whole bunch more pages on the site of course. Although it did appear to increase the site hits considerably (essentially in proportion to the new properties), it meant that the pages themselves took ages to load.

So, over the last few days I’ve made what’s really quite a very minor change so that their properties are divided up amongst as many pages as required to keep to the normal page size but simultaneously listing all of their properties in each of the areas. Net effect is that I’ve several hundred properties listed in some areas where previously I had at best a handful.

These changes generally take about a week for google to pick up so, all being well, early next week I’ll be seeing a bit of a jump in the hits across the board as that change created a few thousand extra pages across the site.

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If you’re selling your property, chances are that you’ve done what many people do and that’s to approach an estate agent or perhaps even several of them.

Now, whilst that’s a good idea it’s usually pretty expensive. Depending on your local laws you can be looking at paying the estate agent anything from 1% to 10% of the sale price which can amount to some serious cash that would be better in your pocket than that of the estate agent. It’s particularly noticeable these days when you may well have had to cut the list price of your property.

So, why not look at some of the self-listing sites that around these days? The newly launched Great Property Direct even has a free listing option so the only cost to you is maybe 15 minutes entering your details which is nothing compared to the thousands that you could save.

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As you know we had something of a nightmare experience trawling through various hosting services earlier in the year before we settled on one (for now). It wasn’t that we were using cheapo services either although ironically the cheapest service was by far the most reliable and we were only forced to dump it when it turned out that their service was just not good enough when we finally hit a problem with them.

Web hosting rating is hoping to change that and the signs so far look good. For instance, they’re currently working through a series of web hosting articles which addresses lots of the issues that I ran into myself. For example, their one on checking out a cheap service is very obvious to me now but only with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. In my own case it was the technical support that I found was bad both among the cheaper hosts and some relatively expensive ones. So far, I’ve been lucky with the speed but the final point they make in the article does worry me a little as the current host are known for offering “the moon” so perhaps that’ll cause me some problems down the line a ways.

We’re going to be reviewing our hosting after the summer and all being well I’ll be able to have a more balanced assessment of potential hosts via WHR.

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